“We are all, one way or another, on a fulcrum between meaning and meaningless, between blunt knowledge and narcotic abandonment. Yet, while energized by that fulcrum, Didion’s work always ends up swinging one way. In an interview with KPFK in Los Angeles in 1972, Didion said her character Maria in Play It as It Lays “is coming to terms with the meaninglessness of experience.” This is Didion’s leitmotif.”